EAGAR – On the edge of what promises to be another hot, drought-fueled wildfire season, timber companies working under the U.S. Forest Service's expiring 10-year White Mountain Stewardship Project are running short of wood.

Eastern Arizona loggers and mill operators told two Southwest senators touring the woodlands on Tuesday that they need faster access to timber to be profitable, and they fear losing more of the forest to a devastating fire this summer.

The White Mountain Stewardship Project expires in August. Its goals are to thin overgrown forests, provide business-creation and job opportunities and prevent megafires like the 538,000-acre Wallow Fire that swept this area in 2011.

That fire consumed 56,000 acres of timber that had been approved for sale, or enough to supply Eagar-area mills for more than two years. Mills now lack timber because of the Forest Service's legal and regulatory requirements for surveying, marking trees and examining effects to endangered species and archaeological sites. Approving timber for sale typically takes at least two years.

"The (Forest Service) region and Washington, D.C., don't understand that they need to catch up," said Dwayne Walker, whose Future Forest company employs about 40 loggers and drivers.

He took part in a tour with U.S. Sens. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., who said they hope to streamline the authorization process legislatively and by working with the Forest Service.

After Wallow, government planners gave some rapid approvals to log dead trees, but most of those rotted before they could be retrieved. A decade earlier, the snags left by the similarly huge Rodeo-Chediski Fire had proved usable for at least three years, forest officials said. But a rainy 2012 summer ruined what Wallow left behind.

This year, the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests will offer companies about as much timber as last year, Forest Supervisor Jim Zornes said, but in a ratio of tree types that won't fully satisfy mill demand.

Typically, to be profitable, mills need 20,000 acres worth of wood, with three-quarters of that in tall timber such as ponderosa pine and the rest in scrubbier piñon and juniper. This year, most of the 20,000 acres will be piñon and juniper. Mills derive valuable lumber from the tall timber; most of the piñon and juniper is burned for electricity and heat.

"We've been trying to play catch-up, and we're treading water," Zornes said.

If the mills — especially a major year-old Eagar operation by Vaagen Bros. Lumber — can hang on, Zornes said next year should be better. The Apache-Sitgreaves forests got $3.1 million from regional Forest Service headquarters to prepare a 30,000-acre sale, serving the dual purpose of rehabilitating the forest and creating a fire break around Pinetop-Lakeside.

After that, the agency's normal workflow should produce a series of sales from Show Low to Escudilla Mountain near the New Mexico state line, meeting demand for the next five years.

It may come too late for Arizona Log & Timberworks, a maker of orchard and vineyard posts, rails and utility poles.

Owner Randy Nicoll told the senators his 15 employees are doing half of what they could be doing right now. He has contracted to supply 12,000 utility poles to Mexico but is 10,000 logs short.

"There's lots of timber out there," Nicoll said, but its legal status leaves him wondering if he'll be able to keep his workers busy this year.

Keeping the mills afloat is more than an economic-development issue. Arizona's ponderosa-pine forest sprawls across more than 2 million acres above the Mogollon Rim.

Northern Arizona University researchers estimate that fire suppression has left 80 percent of it overgrown by hundreds of trees per acre.

Combined with drought and heat stress, Arizona is primed for unnaturally huge fires.

Without the mills, little thinning is possible.

"Without long-term authorization," Flake said at the Vaagen Bros. Four Corner Forest Products mill, "nobody is going to put money into enterprises like this."

Flake supported a successful Farm Bill reauthorization of the government's ability to enter collaborative and subsidized stewardship contracts like the White Mountain project. He also proposes legislation that would direct more money to fire prevention, instead of raiding agency budgets to fight fires.

It cost $130 million to fight the Wallow Fire and rehabilitate the land after it. By comparison, the White Mountain project spends $5 million a year on thinning, said Sue Sitko, northern Arizona manager for the Nature Conservancy.

"We just need to keep this going," Sitko said.

The project did inspire a larger program — the Four Forest Restoration Initiative — although it still awaits federal authorization for most of its cutting. But even as that program ramps up in Coconino National Forest to the west, these mill operators said it is not economically feasible to truck those logs to the Eagar area.

"We just need more funding for the Forest Service to get out on the ground and get more work done," mill manager Kurtis Vaagen said. He would like to have two shifts of 20 workers each processing 40 truckloads a day into parts for pallets and other products, but he is operating now at half of those numbers.

Heinrich said he and Flake are working across party lines to convince Senate colleagues that forest restoration is as important as firefighting.

In harm's way: Read The Republic's in-depth report on the fire hazards of the forest at yarnell.azcentral.com

ON THE BEAT

Brandon Loomis covers the environment and natural resources. He won the 2012 Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment for his coverage of the decline of conifer forests from New Mexico to Canada.